Thursday, September 23, 2010

PE5 Flash


I’ve watched many more tutorials now, and I think I have a clear idea of what Flash really is: Photoshop but animated!  When I first started researching Flash I kept thinking about how similar I remember Photoshop being.  Then it occurred to me that they are sister programs as part of the Adobe suite and it would make sense to make many of the buttons and formatting similar so that a user can easily transition between the two.  I even learned that you can edit a graphic in Photoshop, right while you are in the middle of animating it in Flash! 

I’ve learned that in order to do any animation in Flash, you have to drag your graphic into your “Library” and convert it to a “Symbol.”  One of the tutorials said that the symbol can then be animated with ActionScript, which I am realizing now is the programming language that Adobe uses for animation.  I didn’t realize that before, I thought it was another program!

Once your graphic is in symbol format, you can pretty much do anything, from basic movement, to adding blur effects, to even adjusting the transparency of the graphic (the Alpha I learned its called).  Some of the motion presets you can use are flying onto the screen, bouncing, smoking, pulsing, and zooming around the screen.  You can create your own presets as well if you need to use the same motion again and again.

That purple diagonal line means I made my tree branch move!
The motion effect is called a “Tween” effect, which I think is a really funny name.  Isn’t that also the new marketing lingo for pre-adolescent aged children?  Well, in Flash, its called Tween because it causes a graphic to move beTWEEN two parts of the screen.  I think someone who made Flash has a sense of humor.

I’m still working on figuring out importing and exporting video files.  I’m going to work on that and the next blog will track that progress.

1 comment:

  1. I always wondered myself what Flash was all about and now I know. Thanks for the information, Maia and I will look forward to additional posts on this topic.

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